 |
|
| |
|
||||
This article is about the computer game America's Army. For the Army of the United States, see United States Army.
America's Army is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer game released free of charge by the US Army in 2002, in order to raise the US Army recruiting numbers and public relations. America's Army was developed by the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and is based on the Unreal engine. America's Army is primarily a playable and subliminal piece of video game propaganda and virtual recruiting tool, whose success led to further versions of the game and other games of that type being developed, such as Under Ash (Palestinians), Full Spectrum Warrior (US Army), Close Combat: First to Fight (US Marines) and USAF: Air Dominance (US Airforce) but, unlike America's Army, these games are not free of charge.
OverviewAmerica's Army falls into the subgenre of tactical shooter and, contrasted to reality, is relatively authentic pertaining to graphics and sound, but not modern war. As opposed to "arcade"-style gameplay, it adopted a great deal from Counter-Strike, a Half-Life modification and the most widely played online FPS for the past few years. Counter-Strike was taken as the model for America's Army according to Professor Michael Zyda, the director [1] (http://www.npsnet.org/~zyda/) of the MOVES Institute. The developers claim and especially stress that the number of player accounts is over 4.5 million and they wilfully designated it the number of 'Total Registered Players'. However, the number of accounts does not correspond to the number of players at all, and misleads many people making them wrongly think the game had millions of players. America's Army has had up to 5273 players playing online simultaneously since 2002 and can mainly be found as a free download on the Internet or at recruiting centers around the United States. HistoryIn 1999, after the US Army recruiting numbers had hit their lowest point in thirty years[2] (http://www.cnn.com/US/9909/30/army.recruitment/#1), the Congress of the United States decided to carry out "aggressive, innovative experiments" with regard to the number of recruitments and the US Department of Defense raised its spending for recruitment to more than 2.2 billion US Dollars, which not only paid for the game, but also for a title sponsorship of a team taking part in NASCAR races (where the game is alloted as well). Target groups for recruitment are between 17 and 24-year-old males. In 1999, Lt. Col. E. Casey Wardynski, an economics professor at the US Military academy who later became director of the "Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis" at the US Military academy and the head of the "America's Army" project, exhibited to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel as well as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Military Manpower the idea of an online computer game designed and distributed by the United States Army. Only few mediums have the impact and appeal as computer games do on young American children. On July 4, 2002, the first version of America's Army, named Recon, was released and made available for free as either a download or on CD. Its production costed 7.5 million Dollars and quickly became one of the most often played online first-person shooters, due in part to the large number of free servers sponsored by the US Army that were available. As a Navy-produced booklet states, “specifically, the Department of Defense wants to double the number of Special Forces soldiers, so essential did they prove in Afghanistan and northern Iraq; consequently, orders have trickled down the chain of command and found application in the current release of America’s Army, which features Special Forces roles, missions, and equipment” [3] (http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2004-10-14/cover.asp). On November 6, 2003, version 2.0.0. America's Army: Special Forces was published. This version, more progressive in comparision to the first one, also shows how much personnel and money the US Army invests in the game. The permanent financial support of servers underscores that. The Army is spending $3 million a year to develop future versions of the game and $1.5 million annually to support them. Meanwhile, the developing studios work on version 2.3 Q-Course and 2.4 Overmatch, which should include modern combat tanks. To address a wider and younger audience, America's Army will be released for Playstation 2 and Xbox by summer 2005. ControversyAmerica's Army is a figurative and written type of message presentation, aimed at serving US recruitment, but especially at giving a positive impression of the US Army in general. Although America's Army claims to represent the real army and gives a lot of true information, it is partisan, fails to paint a complete and balanced picture of war and the US army and mainly neglects or leaves out negative aspects (for example the game does not mention or explain to the player that if he quit the Army in real life without having accomplished his period of service, he would be court-martialed). It is for this reason why this game may mislead and create a false impression of reality in support of the army's cause. While many call the game propaganda, some people prefer the euphemism "advertisement" because, in English, the word "propaganda" often carries a strong negative connotation. However, America's Army is not the promotion of a commercial product but is a propagandistic lifestyle message with a governmental background and therefore the word "propaganda" is more fitting [4] (http://www.minitrue.nl/essays/nmnc-aa/justin.html). Also, "the Army readily admits [America's Army is] a propaganda device", asserts Chris Morris, a CNN/Money columnist and director of content development.[5] (http://money.cnn.com/2002/05/31/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/) According to the developers, "children 13+ [...] need to know that the Army is engaged around the world to defeat terrorist forces bent on the destruction of America and [their] freedoms". America's Army, considered by the US Army as a "cost-effective recruitment tool", aims to become part of youth culture's "consideration set," as Army deputy chief of personnel, Timothy Maude, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.[6] (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=hodes20020823) This "battle for young thumbs and minds", as the newspaper The Guardian calls it, by itself has caused worldwide attention, indignation and ethical debates.[7] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/features/story/0,,1242262,00.html) America's Army is the first well-known overt use of computer gaming for political aims and is therefore in the vanguard of this genre. Some debate has sparked surrounding the fact that the game is paid for entirely by US tax dollars. Research papers of two different universities that have analysed America's Army both confirm that the game is propaganda and one also says that "video game propaganda, whether morally right or wrong, is here to stay. It is not a passing phase, but an effective way that the US government has discovered to recruit soldiers and something other nations are now beginning to experiment with as well." The paper predicts that "video game propaganda will prove to be most effective" as well.[8] (http://www-ugs.csusb.edu/honors/02/ResTravis.htm)[9] (http://www.minitrue.nl/essays/nmnc-aa/justin.html) After the paper had been released, a poll by I for I Research confirms 30 percent of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game. Also, one result is appearing at the military academy at West Point where 19 percent of 2003's freshman class state they had played the game. The "aggressive, innovative experiments" called for by Congress seem to be doing their job, as enlistment quotas were met in the two years directly following the game's release. Nevertheless, the boost of recruitment numbers is not the only intention of the game: They intend to give a positive image of the US Army in general, in their own words: "We (the developers) want the whole world to know how great the US Army is". According to the American journalist Gary Webb, Zyda said, "We thought we'd have a lot more problems. But the country is in this mood where anything the military does is great. ... 9/11 sort of assured the success of this game. I'm not sure what kind of reception it would have received otherwise."[10] (http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2004-10-14/cover.asp) Game play America's Army is a team-based war game in which the player controls a soldier of the so-called US Army from the first person perspective. Players fight as either the 'US Army' or (on "Special Forces" maps) Indigenous forces ("IF") against an opposing team called "OpFor" (Army lingo for "Opposing Forces") and specifically as insurgents, enemy forces or terrorists. One of America's Army's unusual features is the design of the player's opponents. The players are divided into two teams, usually into an Assault group and a Defense one, with the Assault losing the round when the time is up (commonly after ten minutes). No matter whether assault or defence - the side the player joins is always depicted as of the US Army whereas the other side is portrayed as of the OpFor on all occasions. The players on each team see themselves as American soldiers carrying American weaponry, such as the M16A2. They see their opponents as non-uniformed foreigners carrying Eastern bloc weapons, such as AK-47s (the counterpart of the M16A2 in the game), except for in training maps, in which the only distinguishing features are the players' uniforms. Not only the opposing US soldiers are depicted differently, but also their weapons, objectives, voices and vehicles. Each round starts with the two teams spawning simultaneously. Unlike in Counter-Strike, players are never allowed to join the OpFor and do not buy their equipment but always start with the equipment of the soldier class chosen [11] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army#Classes_and_its_weaponry). The goal of the game is to complete the level's objectives to beat the opposing team within the given time limit (e.g. you have to kill the rebels' V.I.P., who's trying to survive and escape, or, if you join the other team, you must prevent the same V.I.P. from being shot). The round ends when a team wins the round (which can only be done by either completing the objectives or killing all members of the OpFor), or when the round's time limit is reached. The game tracks how many players each player has killed, how many times each team has won, how many times each player is killed in action, how well the player is contributing to completing the objectives, and the game then distributes score which will not be deleted by the game and which calculates the player's HONOR level. However, it draws a sharp distinction between the US Army (including allied Indigenous forces), and opposing forces. Every death you suffer by another player, every destruction or killing by you of an objective which you are assigned to protect and especially every killing of fellow US soldiers or their allies caused by your friendly fire is called a violation of the ROE (Rules of engagement) in the game and has an extremely negative effect on your score and "HONOR", the game consequently calling the actions dishonorable. Every healing of injured teammates but also killing of opponents, by contrast, increase your score and "HONOR", the Army game consequently calling the actions honorable in general. The accomplishment of the "US Army"'s aims, instead of their opponents aims, affects your score favorably and therefore your "HONOR" as well, indirectly calling the objectives of the US Army honorable and the objectives of its opponents dishonorable at the same time. The score and, as a result, "HONOR" are saved in the players' accounts. The developers claim this reward system (HONOR) is "modeled after" the values "Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless-Service, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage or Leadership". Any players killed before the round is over become "ghosts"; their chat/voice messages cannot be seen/heard by the players still alive, but they can watch the rest of the round. In contrast to Counter-Strike, the developers of America's Army have done little so far to prevent spying ghosts from communicating with those still playing, which has become the most popular type of cheating. Dead players receive information through the chat and the view as ghost and are capable of using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communication programs such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo to let certain living players take advantage of that information, especially information on players' positions, health conditions and weapons. Depending on server configuration, ghosts will have the possibility of watching the rest of the round in one to three ways. The first, which is always available, provides a view from the eyes of a specific player of his team, chosen by the dead player; the second allows the ghost to rotate his view around the chosen player; the third is from certain fixed viewpoints that allow the dead player to observe the entire map. The game is a medium-paced yet tactical shooter, in a similar vein as the "Tom Clancy's" series of shooters. Pacing is fast, in the sense that players can be killed in one to a few shots, although gameplay is a lot slower and contains less action than Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike.
RealismRealism in entertainment goods can be distinguished between quality of depiction compared to reality as far as computer graphics and sound are concerned, and the illustration of the real world as choice for the world intended by the game to depict. While the quality of sound and graphics have always been overwhelmingly preferred as close to reality as possible, the choice for the game's world is often preferred to be unrealistic. The quality of graphics and sound of America's Army is relative to games based on the same engine, such as XIII, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and Unreal Tournament 2003. Apart from quality, the colours that the models and textures have in the game largely conform to the colours they would have in real world, and, except for quality, the sounds, too, relatively conform to the sounds in real world. Like in real life and in Counter-Strike, there is no background music in the game at all. The game depicts modern war and training unrealistically: The training consists of short levels that are easy to accomplish and skips over parts the player might perceive as unpleasant. War is pictured without bloodshed and violence, in which the players die without pain or screams (sometimes not even leaving a corpse behind) and are then allowed to chat and view the outcome of the battle before they are allowed to play again. The player fights distinguishable opponents in a surveyable environment with a Head-Up Display, where everything that moves is either a teammate or an enemy. Players do not need to follow every rule of the Law of land warfare. Civilians are only on two maps. There is not a single one among them who is not yet an adult, and they do neither move nor show any other kind of reaction. Players learn the maps and positions of players by heart while soldiers in reality may face dangers anywhere and anytime. In the game there are no animals, civilian populations comparable to wars today, bombings, ambushes, guerilla warfares, land mines (or other booby traps) or suicide bombers, either. The Guardian described the game's realism as a "Tom Clancy [ novel ] made into episodes of the A-Team". This way to display war is unrealistic but rather typical of video games and understandable because realism often stands in contrast to fun and therefore, according to the developers, they had to balance "between realism and fun". America's Army is realistic in other ways, however; the game includes features such as stamina, the effects of stance and movement on accuracy, player damage mapped based on the part of the body hit and the type of weapon used, and rag-doll physics. Some of these realism-enhancing features contribute to a game pace slower than that of "arcade"-style shooters, but the pace is still faster than that of some other first-person shooters that focus more heavily on stealth. AccountsLike Online Role-Playing games, America's Army obliges all players to use accounts in order that they can track players, can force them to accomplish training and can store their "progress". Although servers run by players cannot change the accounts' data, the servers have to have every player be authorised via the authentification server, which is controlled by the developers, and the servers have to let it decide who should be allowed to play or not. The developers claim the game has over 4.5 million registered player accounts. This number is especially emphasised by the developers and is usually confused with the number of players that the game possesses but, nonetheless, the numbers of accounts and the number of players are not comparable at all. In order to prevent the number from decreasing, accounts can be banned forever but not deleted. While playing on servers provided by the developers, the player can gain and lose experience points. As the name implies, these experience points are the same as those used in role-playing games. They do not affect the player's strength but his restricting access to servers. The number can also benefit players to get their preferred weapon. The experience points are converted into a smaller unit called "HONOR", which is very similar to "Level" in RPGs. "HONOR" is often seen as valuable by players because it can only be increased by playing. However, the higher the "HONOR"-level is, the more experience points the player needs to gain the next one. A lot of players, if not most, understimate the long time [12] (http://home.arcor.de/w0rldspawn/AAA.html) needed to reach 100 "HONOR". The handful of players that already have that number needed far more than 1000 hours to do so. For a long period of time, players have been reported that "their" accounts were "stolen", which can be done by renaming or changing the account's password. However, the accounts are not owned by the player but by the United States Department of the Army. Paranoia among players is spread through various warning messages of ways for "account theft" and reports of loss. Ironically, the trigger for most "account thefts" was a warning message on the official website that warned users not to share the file containing the password. The developers of America's Army are partly responsible for the account "thefts", because they save the username and password without encryption in a specified file in the game-directory as a common CVAR of the Unreal engine and thus permit easy parsing by malware. Furthermore, the developers deny publishing the ID of the account which would prevent the account's disappearance. WeaponryThe game features real-world weapons, modeled carefully. As in life, each has differing qualities of accuracy, deadliness, recoil, and rate of jamming. Players may select from several "classes" including squad leader, rifleman, automatic rifleman, grenadier, and sniper; these classes decide what weapon the player will receive at the beginning of a new round. A few players from each team may also be medics, able to stop the bleeding wounds of their teammates. Each gun also can jam in action and the player needs to press a button to perform an action fixing the gun's jam. Due to both the fact that the player cannot use the weapon while it is jammed and that it takes several seconds to be fixed, this factor - which is based on coincidence - is an incalculable disadvantage for the players. Every firearm in the game has either iron sights (which funtion similarly to those in Call of Duty and Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) or a telescopic sight (for sniper rifles); while using the sights, a zoom effect enlarges objects in view. The iron sights enlarge to a small degree, the telescopic sights to large one. Until he stops zooming, the player's moving speed is additionally decreased. Weapons cannot destroy anything except players and glass. For example, a frag grenade cannot destroy a television. Compared to most other first-person-shooters, however, exlosive weapons are more effective at killing others. Damage by weapons always leads to bleeding (without blood), which causes a player's health gauge to deteriorate over time. Wounds decline running speed, weapon accuracy and health points. It is possible, if the wound is not treated by a medic, for a soldier to "bleed to death". Classes and its weaponryEvery player spawns (=starts the round) with one or two firearm/-s (depending on class and map), if any, a small number of grenades (depending on class and map) and on some maps (depending on team and class) night vision goggles and/or binoculars:
OPFOR/IF Weaponry
"Cheating"Despite the fact that hardware benefits (like a low ping or a fast computer) are gainful factors for a player's success and largely considered to be rightful in the game, software benefits (like modifying the game or using a modified DirectX driver) are often described as "cheating" and as unfair. Many players feel hatred for "cheaters", and frequently players are being accused of cheating, but often wrongly. "Cheating" is occasionally confused with hacking. While cheating has become much more prevalent, "PunkBuster", a popular anti-cheat software, partly financially supported by the game and developed by Even Balance Inc., has been trying to protect modifications unwanted by the developers since version 1.9 of the game. However, "PunkBuster" is usually by-passed by cheats and its datagrams from the client can be legally filtered using a proxy server and thus preventing it from notifying the server the game is connected to of "violations". As in other first-person shooters, there are such cheats as wallhack or aimbot, which are, in America's Army, mostly based on the source code of "evilhack". Currently there is a great deal of cheaters in the game on the grounds that lots of players consider cheating worth the risk. In January 2005, to intimidate, Phil DeLuca, the game's executive producer, has issued an appeal to the increasing number of cheaters, in which he compared cheating to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, pointing out America's delayed but "unstoppable" response to the attack. He declared cheating a "cyber crime" and threatened cheaters, "the bad guys", with involvement of the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Secret Service. "The Army is angry, and we're coming for you." [13] (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=57584) Nevertheless, due to juristical groundlessness and the negligible damage of cheating, the message can only be considered as an attempt of public deterrence and intimidation. VersionsThe most recent update of the game, 2.2.1 America's Army: Special Forces (Vanguard) is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. A Mac OS X version was in development before a sudden change in pricing by GameSpy, which will result in a nearly complete rewrite of the game's network code for the next version. The game currently features 26 multiplayer maps in various locations as well as 14 single player training missions whose completion unlocks certain options for the player, namely the ability to play online or to become medic, special forces unit or sniper. Maps vary in size, objectives, and weaponry available to players. Nevertheless, there is no level editor for the game and the developers have made it impossible for players to use the level design software UnrealEd.
External links
Cheating
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
Copyright 2008 WordIQ.com - Privacy Policy
::
Terms of Use
:: Contact Us
:: About Us This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "America's Army". |